Tuesday, November 18, 2008

1:29 PM - OMG long Warcraft diatribe, read at your own peril

bartle types

A friend recently directed me to Joi Ito's talk on World of Warcraft, which in turn led me to read more about Bartle Types and the four personalities of gamers. I'm not-so-secretly interested in game design, and the idiosyncrasies of Warcraft have made me very interested in the ways that game design affects the social structures that form in MMOs.

Richard Bartle, who was the author of the first MUD (called MUD, ironically), says essentially says that there are four different motivations that people have for playing games. Some people need to explore, some people need to achieve, some people just want to socialize, and some people want to kill.... everything. (He then relates each one of these needs to a suit in a deck of cards: spades, diamonds, hearts, and clubs, respectively.) Okay. Underlying all of this is an unspoken need, at least in MMOs, to be recognized for doing each of these things. When you take their gamer personality test, it's not just about "Would you most like to do X?" but rather "Would you like to be well-known for doing X?" There's a bit of a difference, but the main point is that Warcraft gives people ample opportunities to fulfill the needs of each of these four areas. In fact, Warcraft does this so well that I might even argue that it was designed specifically to target these needs.

The problem I have here, honestly, is that at my core I am not one these four Bartle types. I am drawn to create things and to leave my personal mark on the game world. I want to customize everything; the look of my character, his clothes, his abilities, and his world. (I want to be really obnoxious and say that if the Bartle Types are the suits in a deck of playing cards, then Creators are the Major Arcana in a tarot deck, but I'm trying hard not to be that arrogant! Whee!) For me, the most rewarding experiences I've had with MMOs have been creating my own character and leaving my own imprint on the game world, like creating a house that was a scholar's library in Ultima Online, or designing islands for Puzzle Pirates. Joi Ito talks a little bit about this in the difference between Warcraft and Second Life, but by and large, the desire to create goes unnoticed in mainstream MMOs. Clearly, there is appeal for user-generated content in other parts of gaming (see Spore, Whirled, and Fantastic Contraption, just off the top of my head), but that hasn't made it over to the big MMOs. Warcraft forces people to think inside a very narrow box. Some people are very comfortable there, but I'm really waiting for something better to come along.

Since we are in diatribe mode, here are my 4 big suggestions for the game that I want to be playing instead of Warcraft. I stay because I've got RL friends who play, but realistically, these suggestions would make it so that I enjoy playing, rather than begrudgingly accept the limitations.

1) Character customization. On one level, this means simple allowances, like letting us choose the look of our outfit rather than having it be gear-dependent. Maybe, for example, winning that rare Tier 4 dungeon piece would unlock a new look or armor model in our wardrobe, but players would have some control over their looks instead of being forced into the mismatched thrift shop serious ugly that is traipsing all over Northrend right now. (The new Soul Caliber does this very well, buckos. Take notes!)

On a different level, though, this means allowing us to choose our abilities and design our own characters. Warcraft talents are an okay start, and some talent trees allow for a bit more class customization (like Druids that turn into scary owls if they do spell damage, or shadow Priests that become DPS instead of healers), but let's face it here, the classes and their builds are tight, rigid little boxes that we all get dumped into. There is very little to distinguish one shadow priest from another, one ret paladin from another, etc. Instead of classes, I would like to see characters that are assembled out of skills... As a first step, let new characters assemble their "class" by selecting any three talent trees they choose. "Core" abilities from the classes would be tied to their trees, and then there would be talent abilities, and hidden "synergy" abilities that come from having two talent trees together. For example, a character could be a "Warrior" but replace the Protection tree with the Mage's Fire tree... Now you've got a character who's essentially a melee class, but who has some fire abilities. His armor is weak, and his fire spells are probably weak (since he doesn't have other magic trees to boost his magic stats), but he probably has some synergy abilities like causing his sword to catch fire or having a localized fire effect as part of his sword whirlwind. This is the kind of character customization that I would like to see.

Player housing would be nice, too. That was one of the best parts of Ultima.

2) Eliminate levels. Make the game percentage-based.

Before I lose all of my credibility, let me just say that it seems like the developers are already heading in this direction. Instead of "restores 500 mana" we get "restores 3% of your maximum mana" in lots of abilities and spells in this expansion. I think what people are realizing, slowly, is that the game mechanics are fundamentally the same at levels 10, 20, 40, 70, and 80. You watch the bad guy's green bar go down and hope that yours stays up. We never say, "He's down to 5000 hit points," we instead say, "He's at 30%." So. If the game is based on percentages, why have levels?

The reason we have levels, primarily, is to make players feel better about their achievements. One of my friends, long after I quit playing the game that he played, used to brag about his stats to me. "I just got a sword that does 300 damage!" Out of context, what does that mean? Is that a lot of damage, or not very much at all? I was glad that my friend was excited about it, but it would have been more meaningful to me if he would say, "I can beat my enemy in 2 spells!" or 3 arrows or whatever. The fact is, that 300 damage sword was probably as well-balanced for my friend's new level as his old sword was at his old level.

For this vanity and the illusion of progress, the idea of levels puts enormous strain on the social structures of the game. In my RL circle of friends who play Warcraft, I know someone who plays for several hours every day, someone who splits her time between two different servers and is only around about half time, someone who used to play a lot but has recently been overwhelmed by work, and someone who only plays once a week or so, and mostly to socialize with us. The sad fact is that none of these people can play together. All of their current in-game goals are different, so if one person is doing the quests at their level, another is bored out of their mind. When I log in to play with my friends, I want to be able to actually enjoy playing with my friends.

Ultima Online didn't have levels, it just had skills. Use a certain skill and over time, it would increase. New characters were still weaker than more experienced characters, but the scale wasn't so exponential and overwhelming that it discouraged people from playing together. You could take a new player into a more advanced dungeon filled with dragons, and even if they didn't contribute tons, they could still contribute something and survive. This approach would only give the developers a single point to balance to, instead of trying to devise crazy numbers all along the level scale. I think that we could make characters grow stronger as they progress down the talent trees without having to make it so that taking a two-week vacation means that you can never play with your friends again.

3) Dungeons. I'm sick of having only 5 dungeons that people do, and everyone has them memorized to the point that they fly through on auto-pilot. Dungeons are supposed to be adventures.

In Diablo, the dungeon gets auto-generated out of building blocks the first time you enter. Similarly, I would love to see code where an instance gets dynamically assembled out of building blocks based on the number of people in your party and the difficulty settings. Maybe entering the snow cave instance one day will give you a big main cavern filled with Yeti, and the next day it will give you a series of small caves connected by corridors and overrun by spooky cultists. Or something. I would love for dungeons to be a chance for players to explore and use their skills and be rewarded, rather than mindless regurgitation of a series of known obstacles and Wowwiki's strategies to defeat them.

4) Loot. Loot kills friendships. In most guilds, you are in a subgroup with people of your own class, who are often your little clique within the guild. Except when the sword you've been eyeing finally drops off of the meanyboss. And everyone in your clique is trying to get it. Warcraft has more drama about loot, loot councils, DKP, loot ninjas, mains vs. alts, and need vs. greed than I ever, ever want to hear from a bunch of people who pretend they are elves on the internet.^* Ever.

My suggestion: in Dofus, when a group completes a dungeon together, the loot is awarded to each player automatically by the computer. I'd suggest something similar-- instead of having everyone roll or DKP or mud wrestle for that armor set piece, let the computer reward it automatically. Except... everyone who didn't get it instead gets a little increase on their "loot factor" somewhere in a cranny in a database. And, the next time that monster (or a similar one!) goes down, it makes a roll against each player's loot factor to see if they too can randomly get an armor set piece. If you kill a boss with 10 people who've never gotten the armor piece in the last 50 runs, there's a significant chance that all 10 of them will get the reward, independently of each other. You're competing against yourself instead of against your allies.

Also, I really really like the Badges and Tokens systems.... instead the "drop" being a class-specific piece when you don't have any of that class in your group (and seriously, Blizzard, the idea that your drop tables are simple random number generators is extremely unsophisticated and frankly, I am disappointed), let people decide which armor set and abilities they are working toward. And maybe, once in a long while, analyze a character's chosen talent trees and give them a custom object based on the synergies they have chosen. How cool would it be for the sword warrior with fire abilities mentioned above to one day find a flaming sword that boosts the things he's good at?

Okay, diatribe over. Still, I wanted to get these thoughts out of my system. This is probably why they don't let players create things in games very often.

^*All of my characters are elves. Shut it.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

11:08 AM - your turn!

¡Ya voté!

I have officially voted. I don't really want to wait for the results; I just want someone to come onto the news and say, "Tony's votes are in, so here's what we are going to do." Even though I firmly believe in the importance of everyone voting, the process is still a bit unsatisfying. I wish that instead of just marking some spots on a card, I could add exclamation points, addenda, and commentary.

"Should the City of San Francisco blah blah blah etc?"

"No! Morans. That's a 50 DKP minus, and you lose a turn while you bring me some hot tea."

Since we have not yet conferred that level of power to the voting public, I mostly confine my ranting to my blog... and in this case, I'm using the Spanish bit from the "I voted" stickers, because the two exclamation points feel much more emphatic. I voted... take that! Eat it.

Please get out there and vote. And if you hadn't already guessed, I'd encourage you to vote No on Prop 8 in California.